2.5GHz Barcelona squares off against 45nm 3GHz Xeon

The new availability of Intel's 45nm Xeon parts raises further questions about …

With the despondent thud of Phenom's launch a week ago still ringing in the air, it might seem an odd time to be comparing Barcelona vs. Xeon performance—particularly when the Xeon chips in question are based on Intel's latest 45nm technology. Over at Anandtech, Johan De Gelas has put both the Opteron 2360SE (2.5GHz) and the Xeon 5472 (3GHz) through their paces, and come back with some interesting results.

In general applications and 3D rendering, the Xeon typically dominates. Given what we've seen thus far from Phenom and Barcelona at 2GHz, that's to be expected—Phenom has yet to demonstrate clock-for-clock performance parity with Conroe, much less Penryn. In server-level applications, however, the Barcelona 2360SE is far more competitive. Check the article if you want play-by-play results, but it's good to see that AMD's K10 may still have a future.

Again, however, there's the question of when AMD will be able to ship 2.5GHz Barcelona parts in volume. According to Anandtech, the 2.5Ghz Opteron 2360SE should arrive by the end of the year, with volume shipping in the first quarter of 2008. That sounds wonderful, in theory, but AMD has yet to demonstrate that it can ship 2GHz Barcelona's in volume, much less 2.5GHz. As of this writing, NewEgg has removed all mention of Barcelona from its site—the 1.7-2GHz parts aren't even listed as "Out of stock" as they have been previously. It's also hard not to notice the lack of shipping products based on Barcelona parts—Dell, HP, and Sun don't appear to offer any Barcelona servers, though several of Dell's systems do note that they support the AMD 2300 series (when available).

This isn't the first time we've talked about AMD's shipment problems, but it's an ongoing problem that the company is going to have to solve if they expect to ever realize any revenue from the K10 architecture. Until such time as that's the case, all the positive press in the world won't put badly needed revenue in AMD's coffers.

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